from the touchy-microsoft dept

I'd been meaning to write this up for about a week, but finally got it around to it, just in time to add some additional info. First up, though, comes the news that Microsoft's legal department demanded a blogger remove a blog post about flaws in Bing's Cashback offer (Microsoft's attempt to bribe users to search via Bing instead of Google). One of the methods for the cashback offer involved pixel tracking, and blogger Samir Meghani noted that this was easily gamed to post fake transactions to your account. He also noted problems with the way Microsoft used sequential IDs, allowing potential scammers to "deny cashback rebates to legitimate users by using up available order ID numbers." Instead of dealing with these flaws, Microsoft lawyers sent a cease-and-desist and forced the blog post offline. I'm actually quite surprised this hasn't received a lot more attention.

In the legal nastygram, Microsoft's lawyers claimed that because Meghani had tested the flaws out himself, he was likely guilty of violating "various laws relating to computer intrusion, unauthorized access and unauthorized use of information," while suggesting that his actions could result in criminal charges. That's ridiculous, of course. He didn't actually scam the company -- he was just exposing a flaw. This is legal bullying to silence someone for pointing out a rather basic security flaw in Microsoft's program.

But, of course, even though Meghani was silenced on that issue, it doesn't mean he has to be silent on all of the flaws in Bing's Cashback program, so his latest (found via Slashdot) is that various retailers that offer "cashback" via Bing purchases are showing higher prices if you search via Bing. In fact, the price people can pay if they do certain searches on Bing is higher than if they'd gone direct:

So, if I go directly to butterflyphoto.com, I pay $699 with 0% cashback. If I use Bing Cashback, I pay $758 with 2% cashback, or $742.84. Using Bing cashback has actually cost me $43.84, giving an effective cashback rate of -6.27%. Yes, negative cashback! Is this legal? False advertising? I don't know, but it's pretty sketchy.

The problem doesn't end there. Using Bing has tainted my web browser. Butterfly Photo set a three month cookie on my computer to indicate that I came from Bing. Any product I look at for the next three months may show a different price than I'd get by going there directly. Just clicking a Bing link means three months of potentially negative cashback, without me ever realizing it. I'm actually afraid to use their service even just to write this, because it may cost me money in the future. If you've been thinking about trying out Bing Cashback, you may want to rethink that.

Microsoft responded and called this "an isolated instance" that it had missed with its tools that try to prevent merchants from gaming the system this way. Still, perhaps rather than sending out legal nastygrams and PR pablum to people discussing these things, Microsoft should focus on actually making sure that Bing's Cashback bribery program actually works correctly and safely.